Apparently Trump’s feelings were hurt after the North Koreans said mean things! The Washington Post: President Trump on Thursday canceled a planned summit next month with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, citing “tremendous anger and open hostility” from the rogue nation in a letter explaining his abrupt decision. “I feel it is inappropriate, at […]

Our panopticon is on track: Powered by artificial intelligence, Rekognition can identify, track, and analyze people in real time and recognize up to 100 people in a single image. It can quickly scan information it collects against databases featuring tens of millions of faces, according to Amazon. Amazon is marketing Rekognition for government surveillance. […]

Not really. No, I don’t mean that it isn’t appreciated. It’s just that I don’t need your assistance. Wait, what am I saying?

Let me back up. I’ve been writing that on the bottom of almost all of my business emails lately. And I really mean it. For gawd’s sakes, if you know the answer to my question, please give it to me now!! I really appreciate it.

But it’s cool. I think I am finally getting the hang of my new job. It’s hard to characterize what I do without giving too much away but let’s just call me “The Fixer” at work. It’s my job to analyze situations quickly and come up with equally quick solutions for extremely busy colleagues on my team. Weirdly enough, the R&D background kinda sorta helps in a way I can’t quite describe. Also, it helps to be slightly unhinged in a zany, “off the cuff” but not business inappropriate way. It helps put people at ease.

And in today’s NYTimes Magazine, a study at Google to find what are the characteristics of good teams bears this out. The article is called What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build a Perfect Team. To boil it down, the secret is that people who see their jobs as a crucial parts of their whole lives make better team members. That is, sharing yourself as a person doesn’t just happen in your off hours. You’re going to spend 33% or more of your day at work. It *is* your life. Those people on your team? They’re not just colleagues. They’re people with personalities and lives of their own. Get to know them.

Anyway, I’ve been figuring most of this out in the last several months without Google’s help but I am relieved to know I’m on to something.

Trump had somehow tapped into a fundamental yearning people have: the need for something they can call their own, a way to rise above the relentless challenges of grubby survival. The budding entrepreneurs who sought his counsel wanted to control their own destinies. To these people, Trump personified everything they aspired to, and many believed that a version of his life — or at least the opportunity to enjoy many of the things he valued — was a realistic possibility, if only they had the knowledge or training and a chance to prove themselves.

The fact that Trump himself had inherited a fortune — representing the far more common, universal paradigm that wealth begets wealth and poverty begets poverty — was left unsaid by TrumpU as far as I knew, and was either unknown or overlooked by its customers. Though not every one of these people was completely naive or benighted, I think nearly all of them engaged with Trump University as a way to live Trump’s life vicariously, to embrace the fantasy of being the boss and running the show — projecting power and strutting on a big stage, never pulling punches, never backing down.

Jeez, are these people enjoying their days at work? Do they foster a sense of psychological safety in their coworkers?

Why is it that regular people who love what they do are nothing but Biff Loman’s in TrumpWorld? I sometimes wonder if the people who subscribe most to Trumpism are the ones who have had the most trouble finding their niche in life. Have they never found a job they loved? Felt too cowardly to try something new? Lacked self-esteem? And now they have to project those feelings onto others and make them feel bad for not being fabulously wealthy?

I only ask.

In the off hours, I’ve been playing games with a group of people I met recently. Last night we had some time to try Heads Up. If you haven’t played it yet, get thee to they apps store on your favorite smart phone device. It’s the best 99 cents I’ve spent in a long time. We drew attention to ourselves acting out. Which just goes to show, you don’t have to be a billionaire to have fun.

11 Responses

What really drives me crazy is having to switch keyboard shortcuts between Windows at work and Mac OSX at home. I can’t find the print screen key on my mac laptop and the copy/paste keys on my PC laptop works completely differently.
It’s like Kryptonite.
Oh and the people at work don’t even do Linux at the command line. They use little utilities to do ftp’s and mkdir.
Weird.

I’ve been diving into The Hacker’s Diet and online tools again. Haven’t touched it for a couple of years but the CDC’s Heart Health Calculator says I’m 81 years old…. Which has scared the crap out of me. So I’m hoping my super power is shaving years off my heart!

Trump is the symptom not the disease. The disease is the Republican mindset that you can be RICH ONE DAY. Therefore you must support tax cuts for the rich because one day you are going to be rich too!! Donald is a master at minding this mindset.

With all due respect I guess living in the south maybe makes me see things different. To me what Trump is saying is just loud and proud what people like George W. Bush used to say in code language.

Down here instead of looking at the people they actually vote for like Nathan Deal and holding them responsible for the fact that we have high unemployment here they blame Mexicans for “taking their jobs”. They think they can’t get any help with Medicaid because “black people and Mexicans” are taking all the money. They have a large cultural bolder on their shoulder. They really don’t care about money in a lot of ways because most of them have none and they feel that the reason they don’t have any is because again of black people and Hispanics.

Indeed Trump is a spawn of Reagan and Hill will have to take a few pages from Margaret Thatcher. For Hillary to be the first woman POTUS, she’s gotta man up while not “ball bust” (that is make her superiority so obvious ) Hill can do it. She must seem to like Trump, that will assure his voters in their choice ( which is all we actually want) and encourage them to make another. Fighting Trump Mano ‘e mano won’t work…as the GOP establishment is finding out. The let their brand get stale and now have only the straw men who were set up for Jeb to knock down….was Trump smart enough to see the opportunity that lower the bar for Jeb afforded? Somebody did

Most people I’ve met in life don’t love their jobs, though perhaps only a minority actively hated their jobs. But for most people I’ve known work is about survival and that’s all it is about. Those who do something they enjoy are, in my experience, a lucky minority. (I’m one of that minority myself, but only because my SO earns a lot more than I do. Otherwise I’d have to do something else.)

See, I don’t get that at all. You spend at least 8 hours a day at work. That’s a long time to be at a place where you hate every minute of it. So, you have a couple of options: 1.) Learn to love being there by getting to know your coworkers or 2.) Get another job.
I get it that it’s hard to find work. You don’t have to tell ME how hard that is. But if you really don’t like going to work each day, if it causes you severe stress, and you’re only doing it for the money, then find some way to do a different job. Why would you want to throw away so much of your life?
I was very lucky to have had a job I absolutely loved and it got better towards the end when I really started to understand it. It was stupid for the shareholders to get rid of me when I was just feeling my cheerios.
Then I had a series of subsistence wage jobs. Some were fun, many were not. Now I have a entry level job and it’s actually pretty good. I will never experience the highs I did when I was in science. But I look forward to going to work, and can work across the hall from my bedroom a couple days a week if I want. That saves me gas, busfare and lunch money. The pay is not great but there’s potential.
It could be a lot worse.
And I like the people I’m with.

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Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

The Hill, "Court orders Iran to pay billions to 9/11 victims and families: A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Iran to pay billions of dollars in damages to the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks." It's unlikely they will actually pay it, but the very idea that Iran should have to pay for an attack by Saudi Arabians is pr […]